Organic Strawberries Just Taste Better

Living in South Florida this time of year, the supermarkets are filled to capacity with inexpensive conventional strawberries that look great but are, quite frankly, tasteless despite that they are grown in the region.  I know of many people who believe that organic produce simply tastes better than conventionally grown produce but the taste difference almost certainly has less to do with organic or non-organic agriculture techniques and more to do with a number of other agriculture factors.  Farmers have a range of different and competing market objectives that they can choose in how they produce their strawberries.  For example, here are two extremes of different market focuses that farmers can target: 

• Focusing on minimizing total cost per bushel and growing a durable berry that can handle transportation to distant markets without damage
• Focus on growing berries for a local market that is more focused on flavor and less focused on price

The choice in the farmer's focus means totally different production values just as Kia building a subcompact car has different production values than Rolls Royce building a luxury car.  Having experiencing a Kia subcompact and an Rolls Royce, you can't make a blanket statement comparing cars made in England vs. cars made in South Korea any more than you can make a blanket statement about the flavor of organic vs. conventional agriculture methods.

A farmer that focuses his berries on flavor and premium price will probably grow berries with greater spacing giving each plant more sunshine and allow greater root structure development for better water absorption (less irrigation).  A farmer with this focus may also choose to grow for a longer growing cycle and pick the berries closer to their optimal ripeness for a more ripened on the vine flavor, color and sugar content.  Growing berries for flavor and a premium market can be done with organic or non-organic fertilizer and insecticides (strawberries are nearly universally grown through plastic sheets to eliminate the need for herbicides and tilling regardless of whether they are organic or not). 

What makes them premium flavor (and cost) is not the organic choice over non-organic but all these other choices the farmer makes in his growing methods.  Growing this way will also imply a lower asset utilization--meaning lower yield per acre, lower yield per gallon of fuel and lower yield hour of tractor time not to mention lower yield per hour of farm labor per bushel of output.  Quite simply growing for flavor is more costly by being less "efficient."

By contrast, growing berries for "tonnage"--low cost, high output and durability--implies that berries are going to be planted very close to each other, fertilized intensively forcing fast growth, irrigated aggressively and picked early for durability and for gas ripening close to the berry's final market.  The good news, is that growing this way reduced the amount of land required per bushel and is fundamentally less expensive particularly from an asset utilization, energy and labor cost.  To fertilize so intensively, it is far more likely that a farmer with this market focus will use non-organic fertilizers because they are easier to handle and apply in greater density than organic fertilizers.

I maintain that these farmer choices beyond the organic vs. conventional fertilizer and insecticide choices make the biggest impact on fruit flavor.  The reality is that organic growers are ALSO targeting the premium market so of course they taste better.  The premium market also places more value on the berries being organically grown and since it is unheard of for a premium berry to be not organic just as it is unheard of for a tonnage produced berry to be grown with organic methods.  There is, therefore, little opportunity of a real comparison between berries made using the same agricultural techniques and market objectives and just varying in their type of fertilizer and insecticide.  Better taste of organic berries may very well just be a side affect of these other factors.